Tom Hanks and the craze for classic communist cars

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When Tom Hanks visited Budapest, he fell in love with a communist icon: the tiny Polski Fiat 126p. Every time I saw one parked on the street, with its square shape and adorable flashing headlights, I posted a photo on Twitter with the caption: “My new car!” The inhabitants of the Polish city of Bielsko-Biała, where Fiat had been manufacturing the car since the 1970s, took it seriously. A year later, in 2017, he was presented with a beautifully restored white Polski 126p, with his name engraved on the leather seat pockets.

Local media captured Hanks picking up the car in California, revving the engine and coughing as if choking on the exhaust. This is a familiar smell to many drivers of Poles, East German Trabants, Soviet Ladas and Yugoslav Zastavas, the delicate little family cars that were made in communist Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989, when import restrictions forced each Eastern Bloc country to have their own. motor industry. They had a certain reputation. In Die hard with revengeBruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson start a Zastava Yugo with a screwdriver (Hanks joked that he hoped to fix his own Polski with a screwdriver and a woman’s belt).

They have an undeniable cuteness with their bubble-shaped lights.

Westerners once considered such cars so trash that in 1987, Yugo makers responded with a humorous campaign: “If you wreck your Mercedes but can’t afford to fix it, just buy a Yugo.” Nowadays, that’s exactly what Americans do: buy a Yugo. It’s not just Hanks’ influence. The trend started around 2018, when Fiat released facelifted models of its original 500 and 600, but some felt they lacked the original charm, so they started looking at other cars. They decided on the Yugo, made by the Serbian brand Zastava, and the Polski, both made in collaboration with Fiat when Italy had good trade relations behind the Iron Curtain.

Since then, Eastern European workshops have been busy restoring cars from the 1960s and 1980s to sell. Erik Griffith, founder of mint car in Belgrade, attributes the demand to “Cold War nostalgia; “Americans grew up not being able to access these mysterious objects that we saw in European spy movies.” He points to the classic Lada Riva saloon, built by Russian manufacturer AvtoVAZ and seen on screen in the James Bond film. There is no time to die. “It’s the attraction of things we couldn’t have,” Griffith says. Its buyers range from older collectors who love “the classic round headlights and polished chrome” to wealthy young buyers who road trip in a vintage car that “turns heads on the weekends.”

Others want something tougher: “weird little cars,” as Griffith calls them, like Trabants and Ladas. They are nearly indestructible and, unlike the Yugo, reliable once worn parts have been upgraded. Griffith also does a solid business with customized tank-type Lada Nivas 4x4s (priced up to €18,000) that it sources in the Balkans for American customers.

They also have an undeniable cuteness, with their bubble-shaped headlights. When Zastava exported the Yugo to the United States in the 1980s, it had appeal because it was the opposite of the big pickup trucks Americans drove. Marketed as a small car for his teenage daughter, it eventually became the official vehicle of the US volleyball team in 1986. Upstate New York-based collector Philip Pameri was drawn to its speedy Yugo 88 GVX with white and red stripes for its peculiar character; He couldn’t resist calling her “Hugolina Yugovich.” He marked it down from $6,000 to $2,500 on eBay.

Jovana Ninković, a Serbian tattoo artist who has become a passionate collector and restorer of Zastavas, including the Fića, Yugo and 101 models, loves her gold 1978 Fića with its vintage round headlights and curvy chrome bumpers. He found it through Instagram for €1,200. “It’s stylish, fun to drive and has a lot of personality,” he says. “I love the smell of gasoline, the happy colors, the feel of the mechanics. The Zastavas are easy to retrofit: put a bigger engine and you have a little rocket.”

Its past is attractive to collectors. “They are historical treasures,” says Ninković. For her and other like-minded people, Yugo embodies nostalgia for an era of ingenuity. “We made these cars with what we had in Yugoslavia. They achieved great things. They once drove to Kilimanjaro,” he says, referring to an expedition of five Zastava 101s that traveled from Serbia to Tanzania in 1975 to demonstrate the car’s ability to withstand all types of terrain. Ninković especially likes the rare Zastava Cabrio convertible, one of the smallest hatchbacks in automotive history, of which only 500 units were produced. They occasionally appear on the market; Polovni Automobili has an agile lemon yellow convertible Cabrio for sale for 10,000 euros.

For others, Eastern European cars offer something delightfully ironic. A red Zastava 101 went viral on TikTok in 2023 when collector Alex Krainov parodied a brilliant Bentley advertisement with his beat-up boxy vehicle. Since then, he has happily documented his Zastava road trips through Serbia, even when he had to push the car uphill.